Wednesday, May 20, 2015

It’s always been difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of psychotherapy.

By now, most therapists and patients have figured out that
psychoanalysis can neither treat nor cure mental illness. They have moved
on to medication and cognitive-behavioral treatments (CBT).

New York City psychiatric institutions, previously a bastion
of Freudian psychoanalysis, discarded psychoanalysis a couple of decades ago,
and replaced it with psychopharmacology and CBT.

It was not all Aaron Beck and Martin Seligman. There was
also Marsha Linehan.

I began hearing about Linehan more than a decade ago. Her variation on CBT was strikingly effective with
patients suffering from borderline personality disorder. It was called
dialectical-behavioral therapy (DBT).

Young therapists in New York psychiatric hospitals were flying out to Seattle to
learn the technique from Linehan herself.

Yesterday, Will Lippincott testified to the
therapeutic benefit of DBT in the New York Times.

The Times has begun a column called “Couch” wherein therapists
and patients recount their experiences with treatment. Lippincott’s is dramatic
and telling.

It offers an indication of where the therapy profession is
today.

Lippincott opens his story:

In
January 2012, two weeks after my discharge from a psychiatric hospital in
Connecticut, I made a plan to die. My week in an acute care unit that had me on
a suicide watch had not diminished my pain.

Back in
New York, I stormed out of my therapist’s office and declared I wouldn’t return
to the treatment I’d dutifully followed for three decades. Nothing was working,
so what was the point?

One is tempted to speculate about what kind of treatment
Lippincott was following for three decades, but whatever it was, it left him
suicidal... even when accompanied by a stay in a psychiatric hospital.

As a young man Lippincott had made a plan for beating his
depression. He was doing talk therapy and taking medication. The plan worked…
until it did not:

But I
had an ambitious plan to beat it. I’d be a performer: work hard, keep my goals
in the line of sight at all times, and make as much money as I could.
Professional success would be my first line of defense to keep hopelessness at
bay. In parallel, I’d find excellent doctors and be a compliant patient, take
my meds and show up for talk therapy.

And for
a long time, through my 20s and 30s, that plan worked.

Then,
in 2008, a business deal fell through, and I couldn’t shake my disappointment.

This episode recalls an observation made by Helen Block
Lewis in her excellent books on shame and guilt in neurosis. She noted in her
own practice that some of her patients who had completed psychoanalysis later suffered breakdowns because they
did not have the tools or the skills to deal with failure and shame.

Instead of committing suicide Lippincott checked in to the
Menninger clinic in Houston. Originally founded in Topeka, KS in 1919, the
clinic was originally known for offering psychoanalytically oriented treatment.

When he got there, Lippincott was introduced to dialectical
behavior therapy:

A few
weeks after I arrived, I was enrolled in a dialectical behavior therapy skills
group.

D.B.T.
is a therapy that was developed in the 1980s by the psychologist Marsha M.
Linehan as she worked with suicidal patients suffering from borderline
personality disorder. In spite of my 30 years as an avid, often desperate
medical consumer, I’d never heard of it.

I, too am surprised that Lippincott never heard of Marsha
Linehan.

Linehan’s approach is a variant on cognitive treatment.
While cognitive treatment focuses on the mind and the way it interprets
emotion, DBT identifies behaviors that patients employ to deal with their
symptoms and helps them to replace them with new, more constructive behaviors.

(For a description of the CBT treatment of social anxiety,
see my post yesterday.)

The concept will be familiar to readers of this blog.
Linehan is adopting Aristotle’s idea that the best way to overcome bad habits
is to replace them with good habits. Note well, her approach does not require
patients to discover the root causes of their bad habits.

Lippincott explained:

But Dr.
Linehan found that C.B.T. didn’t always work for her suicidal patients. Some
found its emphasis on changing their own thinking tantamount to the belittling
notion that their pain was “all in their head.” Many of them had experienced
very real trauma, and many had tried fruitlessly to change many times before.
C.B.T.’s implication that their emotion was “wrong” — merely a consequence of
inaccurate thoughts — made the therapist seem unsupportive, and reinforced
their sense of isolation and hopelessness….

It’s
not that we have the “wrong feelings”; it’s that our feelings flood and
overwhelm us, in ways they might not overwhelm someone with different genes,
and that it takes longer for those feelings to ebb and subside. In response,
she began articulating strategies, or “skills,” for people with these
vulnerabilities.

It is
in the pivotal moment between experiencing a feeling and acting on it, the
theory goes, that I have a chance to “act opposite”: to behave differently from
how I have historically, and often destructively, managed distress.

Here, the key concept is to “act opposite.”

When people have, for example, been traumatized, they
develop certain behaviors and certain ways of conducting themselves. In
principle, the behaviors help them to avoid trauma and mitigate their anguish. In fact, they replicate the
trauma.

If, for example, people feel depressed and cut off from others they will likely try to construct relationships by being overly dramatic
and overly emotional. They will not know that the best way to develop
relationships involves being polite and well-mannered, considerate and
respectful.

In a DBT approach, patients are coached to develop those and similar skills.

Lippincott described his own experience. Note that he
identified behaviors that accompany his depressed states. He did not attempt
to find the root cause of the depression:

When I
was depressed, the self-possession I presented to the world belied just how out
of control I felt inside. In my search for relief from anxiety, anger or
sadness, I’d act impulsively — spending money when I couldn’t afford it,
isolating myself from friends, lashing out at those people closest to me, even
hurting myself physically. Afterward, I was kept low by regret. My urges to act
out may have been satisfied, but now I had a set of new problems: debt, broken
relationships, a hangover. Unable to forgive myself for my mistakes, the anger
returned.

As for managing his anxiety, Lippincott learned to perform
specific actions that would mitigate it:

I
followed the strategy of distracting myself with highly specific tasks just
long enough — usually for two or three minutes — to lower the intensity of the
fear before it overwhelmed me. Depending on where I was — at home, at work or
on the street or train — I’d reach for a situationally appropriate activity.
And because I can’t rely on my memory when anxiety swells, I’d carry lists on
an index card or on my phone: pull out a piece of paper and write down all 50
states and their capitals — in my non-dominant hand; grab ice cubes from the
fridge and hold them on the back of my neck; snap the rubber band on my wrist.
At the office or in a meeting, I learned to make subtle changes to my posture
like bunching my toes, half-smiling to activate facial muscles, even slowing my
breathing.

Treatment taught him how to direct his focus away from
feelings and toward facts. Reasonably so. You cannot solve problems in the real
world by getting in touch with your innermost feelings:

Mindfulness
challenges me to accept emotions and situations as they are, not as I want them
to be. I’ve learned how to “observe and describe”: to state the nature of a
problem with facts, not judgments, so I can determine how best to solve it.

As for emotions, DBT taught Lippincott how to step back from them and to try to understand what they are trying to tell him about
reality.

Emotion
regulation teaches me how to identify and understand the functions of my
emotions, and how to decrease my historic vulnerability to extreme moods. If
I’m aware of how I feel physically when I’m sad, or how my speech pattern
changes when I’m angry, I can recognize where I am and change course before the
intensity of the emotion gets too high.

6 comments:

re: As for emotions, DBT taught Lippincott how to step back from them and to try to understand what they are trying to tell him about reality.

In this line of thinking, I think of the H.A.L.T. acronym, for 4 basic needs: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired. Those "feelings" at least are easy to understand, and by managing these easy ones, the harder ones like guilt and shame in failure can be more managable.-------https://bradfordhealth.com/halt-hunger-anger-loneliness-tiredness/

The key to maintaining a life in recovery is a combination of self-care and self-awareness. By taking care of ourselves and recognizing certain signs, we can prevent relapse. One of the tools some people use is HALT. This handy acronym reminds us to take a moment (HALT) and ask ourselves if we are feeling Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired.

It seems simple enough, but when these basic needs are not met, we are susceptible to self-destructive behaviors including relapse. Fortunately, hunger, anger, loneliness, and tiredness are easy to address and serve as a warning system before things reach a breaking point.

Hunger can be physical or emotional need. Understanding the need to eat is fairly straightforward. However, we should remind ourselves not just to eat, but to eat well. Meeting nutritional needs allows our bodies to operate to the highest potential, and will keep up feeling better. However, when we HALT and assess our situation, we can describe a hunger for less tangible things such as affection, accomplishment, and understanding.

Anger is a normal, healthy emotion to experience. The important thing is to HALT, and take time to understand what is causing your anger, and know how to properly express it. Perhaps you are angry with a situation, a person, or maybe yourself. It might be one little thing that spins out of control, or an ongoing event. No matter what is bothering you, assess whether or not you can confront what is angering you. Calmly talk to the person you have an issue with or fix the problem you’re having.

Loneliness can occur when we are by ourselves or when surrounded by many people. We isolate ourselves when we don’t feel like others can understand us, withdrawing into ourselves out of fear or doubt. Being alone is a self-imposed situation. If you’re feeling lonely, HALT and ask yourself if you have reached out to anyone lately.

Tiredness takes a toll on our bodies, mind, and spirit. When our days are filled with errands, meetings, and activities it is easy to ignore how tired we become. However, running on low energy compromises our ability to think and our capacity to cope. Taking the time to HALT is particularly important when you’re tired. Satisfying the physical need to sleep, rest, and rejuvenate is critical to keeping healthy physically, emotionally, and spiritually. A good night’s sleep or a leisurely nap may be all you need to change your outlook for the day.

HALT can serve as a reminder to all of us that we need to take care of our basic needs every day. For those recovering from addiction, paying closer attention to your feelings will help you prevent relapse. Take a moment each day to check in with yourself. Ask, “Am I hungry, angry, lonely, or tired?” Honestly assessing how you feel takes only a minute. Doing so will make the everyday stress of life easier to deal with and help you maintain sobriety.--------

Congratulations! It is my privilege to introduce you as "Enthusiastic Self-help Blogspot Author of the Week". You can visit my profile to go to my blog. Looking forward for more informative and quality posts from your blog.

It is good to see recognition of DBT and Marsha Lineman. I do think that you are under-emphasizing the role that mindfulness (awareness and acceptance of the present moment) plays in DBT. DBT is Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, where the the dialectic is between the acceptance in the moment and the need for change.

It continues to be remarkable to me that someone who mock others' judgment makes so many judgments of his own.

And how someone who has not written a book of his own is so pathologically mocking of the blog host's own work. So small, Ares... so small. You have so little to be proud of, Wikipedia references notwithstanding.

Thanks, IAC for those incisive and wise remarks. I suspect that AO has not read said book.... Now, if only some other readers of the blog, beyond you, would write reviews of my new book on the Amazon site. Apparently, that's a wish too far.